Wendy Mascio | Sales & Business Experiences
Wendy Mascio, the CEO of Workscape, and a guest lecturer at Grove City, spoke about her experience in sales as well as her experience in starting a startup company. She focused on personal experiences in business that pushed her to create a new career for herself such as not being “okay” with the status quo, tenacity, self-reliance, calculated risk, failure, and keeping an open mind. One thing that she mentioned, but didn’t focus all of her attention on was the sales umbrella in terms of traits that both men and women hold. This was such a little portion of her lecture, but truly caught my attention.
Men Vs. Women
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Although men are fully capable of empathy, the are not always the best. In the world of sales, Mascio made in extremely clear that most men and the “Killer Hunters.” They know what they want and they go after it, sometimes at full force. Women can have this exact same drive and trait, but they generally do it with a little bit of a softer side. Again, this is the same wiring, but women just carry a different ability that allows them to be a little less threatening. This still doesn’t make one better than the other, but almost gives women an advantage in the world of sales.
Mascio spoke to a few more traits that allowed her to become a sales woman after being a Biology major at Grove City College. She made it clear that a lot of her experience came from reading about sales, experiencing sales, and a little bit of trial and error. From there, she mentioned that sometimes sales is just a natural process for people. If it is not natural, start to find ways to learn more about sales, attend networking events, and start to build transferrable skills to move your way into the industry.
BoweryJE22
I definitely agree! While men have very good qualities to offer to the workplace and the sales space, empathy may not be their strong suit. Women, on the other hand, more delicate creatures in nature, appear to be better at being empathetic. That doesn’t just get aimed at other women, but to any customer no matter what gender. Women are more in tune with feelings and emotions which leads to them generally being better at exercising this quality.
I also love when she said that as a woman, don’t feel the need to be a man in the workplace. So many times we feel that we need to keep up with our y-chromosome co-workers to feel that we are impressive, but in the long run, we are women and God gave us differential qualities from our male counterparts for more reasons than we may ever care to know. As women in the workplace, we need to be in tune with what we can offer as women to the workplace, which is very unique in itself. Great post, Erin!
At first, I hesitated when reading the article (being a male) but I do agree and believe our gender can tend to have us built a certain way to think. Just like being a good salesperson, adaptation is a huge skill. So as a male I think our adaptation for empathy is hard.
I agree with Larry in his initial hesitation, but this post was very accurate and I do think women and men have distinct differences that can help and hurt in sales! Great post!